Oiro Pena is a mysterious Finnish jazz collective whose musical DNA carries traces of Pharoah Sanders’ spiritual jazz and Sun Ra’s cosmic excursions. The collective is led by drummer and composer Antti Vauhkonen, who started with electronic music and krautrock before finding his way into avant-garde jazz. About their latest album Puna, Loud And Quiet wrote: “filled to the brim (occasionally well above the brim) with noise, energy and unusually compelling excursions into freely tumbling near-chaos”.
The evening is shared with Phardah: a free jazz quartet with a psychedelic touch existing at the intersection of free improvisation and hypnotic repetition. Their debut album Humans and Beings consists of two long pieces where the saxophone burns freely over pulsating bass lines and trance-like grooves. Since their debut at Odysseus Festival in 2023, Phardah has methodically built up interest and an audience, and been noticed in magazines like The Wire.
The bands share saxophonist Sami Pekkola, and together they represent two sides of adventurous, idiosyncratic Finnish jazz. Both bold, free and uncompromising. Come and lose yourself completely in the magical, mysterious Finnish jazz forest.
This concert is part of the series Finlands Sak I Vår where we, together with the Finnish Institute, highlight five of the most exciting Finnish names at the outer edges of jazz, psychedelic funk and synthetic pop.
